Ian H. Witten is a professor of computer science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. His research interests include language learning, information retrieval, and machine learning. He has published widely, including several books: Managing Gigabytes (1999), Data Mining (2005), Web Dragons (2007), and How to Build a Digital Library (2003). He is a Fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He received the 2004 IFIP Namur Award, a biennial honor accorded for “outstanding contribution with international impact to the awareness of social implications of information and communication technology,” and (with the rest of the Weka team) received the 2005 SIGKDD Service Award for “an outstanding contribution to the data mining field.” In 2006, he received the Royal Society of New Zealand Hector Medal for “an outstanding contribution to the advancement of the mathematical and information sciences,” and in 2010 was officially inaugurated as a “World Class New Zealander” in research, science, and technology.
Eibe Frank lives in New Zealand with his Samoan spouse and two lovely boys, but originally hails from Germany, where he received his first degree in computer science from the University of Karlsruhe. He moved to New Zealand to pursue his Ph.D. in machine learning under the supervision of Ian H. Witten, and joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waikato as a lecturer on completion of his studies. He is now an associate professor at the same institution. As an early adopter of the Java programming language, he laid the groundwork for the Weka software described in this book. He has contributed a number of publications on machine learning and data mining to the literature and has refereed for many conferences and journals in these areas.
Mark A. Hall was born in England but moved to New Zealand with his parents as a young boy. He now lives with his wife and four young children in a small town situated within a hour’s drive of the University of Waikato. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computing and mathematical sciences and a Ph.D. in computer science, both from the University of Waikato. Throughout his time at Waikato, as a student and lecturer in computer science and more recently as a software developer and data mining consultant for Pentaho, an open-source business intelligence software company, Mark has been a core contributor to the Weka software described in this book. He has published a number of articles on machine learning and data mining and has refereed for conferences and journals in these areas.